Announcing Determinate Nix

[Anomalocaris]

@fricklerhandwerk

Proprietary additions do not need to take away from upstream, to the contrary: They can provide a source of income for authors, and absorb a chunk of feature requests that wouldn’t fit upstream anyway; independent groups can also move more quickly and explore the solution space to common problems. Conversely, upstream can focus on stability and standardisation; it’s a very different kind of work that also needs to be done, and it can mesh nicely if we’re deliberate about it.

Sure, they don’t necessarily need to, but in practice, how could you ensure that? It seems like it opens an opportunity for perverse incentives. If a feature’s enticing enough, it will draw people in and if it’s proprietary, then it would be easy for DetSys to lock people into their version, intentionally or not.

Regarding authors making a source of income, there are other ways companies have used open source to accomplish it, such as providing professional support, to name an example.

If you want to experiment with additions to Nix without upstreaming it, would the resulting fork strictly have to be proprietary? Why not maintain a fork while keeping it open source and just not make an upstream PR? I doubt Lix and Tvix necessarily plan on upstreaming their changes, for instance.

@fricklerhandwerk

I’d love to see Nix become more of a “library” (minimal, composable building blocks that aim for maximal control), and downstream distributors providing “frameworks” (battries-included scaffolds for gluing together domain-specific solutions that aim for maximal velocity).

That sounds like a somewhat okay idea on its surface. However, I can’t help but suspect that Determinate Nix would suddenly be declared the reference implementation for such a tool if that were to pass. Could you (or someone else) perhaps alleviate these suspicions?

@fricklerhandwerk

I’d even go as far as saying that if Determinate Systems buys into flakes so much that they’re willing to guarantee stability, and they and their users are fine with the trade-offs involved, it may as well be a downstream-only feature.

I would say stripping a very popular and useful feature from Nix and privatizing it is already a huge trade-off. What would the benefits of such a move even be? For people other than DetSys, specifically.

@grahamc

Valentin, if you truly mean that – and I hope you don’t – then fine. If that is what it takes to get clarity for Nix’s users about the status of flakes, then please: rip the bandaid off and call it done. Determinate will be the flag-bearer of flakes, and Nix can go on without them.

@grahamc

At this point, I think the situation is less about absolute numbers, and more the Nix project taking ownership over what it wants, freeing the community from this miserable scenario, and make a decision that could end this whole argument with the stroke of a keyboard.

If that means the Nix project says goodbye to flakes – ok! I think that is a bad idea, but ok!

I think I am missing something. What problem is this solving? You mentioned it would make it clear to Nix’s users about the status of flakes, but I do not see how breaking tons of downstream users by removing a widely-used feature and giving control of its further development to a for-profit company is a good way to do that.